Lives cut short. Every year, scores of Chicago children are shot, knifed and beaten on the city streets. Almost as frequently, new policing strategies are rolled out, anti-violence programs are launched and private and public money is thrown at the problem. Chicago's continuing struggle to combat youth violence over the years has sparked everything from gang interventions to an ambitious plan in Chicago schools to pair troubled youths with intensive mentoring and even jobs. The latest spasm of violence, a fatal melee among Fenger High School students, is bringing federal education and law enforcement officials to Chicago this week.

Barbara BrotmanTRIBUNE REPORTER

The Tribune explores the reverberations, many years later, of the killings of three children -- the echoes of pain, of anger and of inspiration.

Last Sunday, Byron Taylor strode down a church hallway, a tall 29-year-old with stylishly locked hair pulled back over the neck of his three-piece pinstriped suit, a whirl of speed under control.

He wove through knots of elders in long, white cassocks and little boys in imperfectly tied ties, shaking hands, opening doors and greeting everyone he knew, which was apparently everyone.

He was the very picture of an intelligent, accomplished, respected and loved young man.

Sixteen years ago, he was the picture of something else.

In 1993, a schoolmate of Taylor's was shot to death. Shaun Carey, 14, who had just graduated from Holy Angels School and begun Mount Carmel High School, was one of 65 children younger than 15 killed that year. As part of its coverage of the tragic toll, the Tribune ran a photograph of Byron Taylor in his classroom at Holy Angels, wiping a tear from his eye as he wrote an essay on gun violence.

The image seemed to crystallize not just the loss of innocence of a 13-year-old boy but the pain of an entire city whose young were being cut down. It was so arresting that four TV stations came out to do stories on young Byron. Tom Brokaw came to the family's house and sat in their kitchen.

It was too soon to tell how Shaun's killing, and other violent deaths that that touched Byron's life as he grew up, might affect him.

But it isn't too soon any more.

"All I could think about was, 'He's never going to see his mom again. He's never going to do anything,' " Taylor said.

He stood in his new condominium on the South Side, with its gleaming hardwood floor and its saffron-painted walls and thought about that long-ago death and the way it had lit a kind of fire.

On some level, he thinks, knowing a child who never got to live his life inspired him to make something of his own.

"I think this was the catalyst to get serious about what was going on," he said. "Going to the Navy, going to college -- all that started here.

"I never forgot this. It was always there, that I've got to keep going.

"So, I kept going."

He kept going, from high school to college, from college to the Navy, from the Navy to graduate school, from graduate school to a postgraduate program. He kept going, from a master's degree in social work from the University of Illinois at Chicago to a career as an addictions psychotherapist, working now at the Jesse Brown VA Medical Center while studying for a doctorate in counseling psychology at Argosy University Chicago.

He kept going, from a boy who attended church to a man who helps lead one, filling so many roles at Prayer & Faith Outreach Ministries on the Far South Side that the Rev. William Hudson III, church pastor, said, "I don't know how he balances everything he does."

He reinvented parts of himself and even renamed himself, discarding Byron and taking as his first name Taylorr, a rakish spelling of his last name.

But as quickly as he has moved, he has essentially remained the same sunny boy who used to herald his daily arrival from school with a Ricky Ricardo-worthy, "Lucy, I'm home!"

He visits his mother and aunt in Harvey almost every night. He bakes cookies. When his dog sneezes, he says, "Bless you."

"None of us is perfect," said Rosemary Walton, 61, Taylor's best friend, who has been singing in choirs with him for 15 years and joins him every Sunday for an afternoon meal they call "dunch." "But I think he is the total package."

When Taylor was born, his mother was living with a friend of her grandmother's -- a social worker her grandmother hoped would help teach the young woman how to raise a baby. She was a good girl, one of Taylor's cousins remembers, about 19 years old, with a bit of a smart mouth.

One day when the baby was several months old, family members say, she got into a car with a man and disappeared.

And Gloria Taylor kept going too. She moved Byron and her two older daughters repeatedly, trying to find safer blocks in the Englewood neighborhood. Even so, Taylor remembers New Year's Eves when she ordered the children to lie on the floor in case of gunfire.

But she created a calm oasis at home, Taylor said, and when the outside world intruded, as it did with Shaun's death, she turned it into a lesson.

"My mom -- my mom is awesome -- she sat me down and talked to me," Taylor said. "She explained how valuable life is, how fleeting it can be. ... She said that when life is given to you, you have to make the best of it."

Gloria Taylor, now 61 and retired, was terrified for her son, who rode a bus to Holy Angels.

"I worried about him all the time," she said. "I was strict sometimes with him."

She didn't really have to be. Taylor had no interest in hanging out on the street. He liked staying home; he had nice friends. But being a good child does not guarantee safety in a hard neighborhood. Taylor was surrounded by violence.

"I remember two doors down from me, the guy was shot; he was my friend's brother," Taylor said. "I remember pistol-whippings in the alley behind the house. Friends were killed, all through high school."

When Byron graduated from Holy Angels at the end of the year Shaun was killed, Gloria Taylor moved the family to Harvey so Byron could attend Thornton Township High School. They were finally in a safe neighborhood, but still, "I went up to the school a lot to check in on him," she said. "I would take my lunch break and go see how he was doing. Half the time, he didn't even know."

Byron had been growing husky, but in high school he ballooned to 300 pounds. And flummoxed by the freedom of being out of a school uniform, he floundered socially.

"It was one of those things," he said, shrugging. "But things change."

He changed them.

He decided that it was OK not to be one of the cool kids. He made his peace, and then started losing the weight. He dated one of the cutest girls in school. He went to college, first Trinity Christian College and then UIC. But at UIC one semester, he was unable to get into a course he needed. Determined to keep moving, he impulsively called a Navy recruiter. When he found out he could get reimbursed for graduate school, he enlisted.

He served as a religious program specialist, assisting chaplains and overseeing the choir. And in the Navy, he gave himself his new name. One day someone jokingly called him "Taylor Taylor." The nickname stuck, and because he had always hated "Byron," he unofficially changed his first name, later giving it a distinctive spelling. His mother and aunt still call him Byron -- "It's his name," insisted his aunt, Loretta Poliah. But his mail is delivered to "Taylorr Taylor."

After five years of active duty that took him from Australia to Dubai, and three years in the Individual Ready Reserve, he returned to Chicago. Then he set out to find his father.

He had stayed in touch with his birth mother's grandmother, who often mentioned that she knew where his father lived: somewhere along a 15-block stretch of a street in Harvey.

One day eight years ago, Taylor put on his Sunday best and began knocking on doors. Six and a half hours later, he found his father's parents, and through them, his father. He has now added to his life a delighted father, stepmother and four half-brothers.

"I am so proud of him," said his father, Kenneth Anderson, 50, a machine operator who lives in Lynwood. "I just wish I was in his life for more than these few years."

Violence continued to chew at the edges of his life. Two young men he had mentored at his previous church were killed, one recently. His former pastor's stepson was shot and killed this year as he was sitting in a car talking with a friend.

During an internship running a group for at-risk youths in East Chicago, he gave the boys advice on how to keep away from gun violence. Obey your parents, he told them; be where you're supposed to; don't give in to peer pressure.

Even those, of course, may not be enough.

Why did Byron Taylor escape the violence that claimed so many others? An involved mother, a spiritual base, an innate dislike of street trouble, a drive to achieve, luck -- who can say?

Sixteen years after Shaun Carey was killed, Taylor looked once more at the newspaper story on his death.

"This could have been me," he said. "I didn't have to be here now. I was in the same environment, exposed to the same stuff." Taylor's explanation is faith.